Cliff at Ã‰tretat, the Porte d' Aval, 1869

Gustave Courbet

Although Gustave Courbet became famous in the mid-century for his large-scale paintings dedicated to a realism rooted in left-wing politics, later in his career, the artist turned to landscape. A natural course for an artist deeply connected to his rural roots well outside of Paris, these landscapes and seascapes are as much about the physical qualities of the paint as they are about the physical qualities of the scene. Marine, for example, is an exquisite rendering of sky, sea and sand, in which the paintâ€”often dragged across or scraped from the surface with a palette knifeâ€”assumes the qualities of the very landscape Courbet has chosen to represent. This technique is also found in Cliff at Ã‰tretat, The Porte dâ€™Aval, where the solidity of the unusual cliff formations attracted Claude Monet, EugÃ¨ne Boudin and Henri Matisse, among others. The craggy rocks, asperity of the sand and striation of the cliffs in the distance against the strikingly smooth sky speak directly to the profound link between the Frenchmanâ€™s artistic approach and his native landscape.